Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

One of the most popular articles ever written for the Harvard Business Review was authored by Frederick Herzberg in 1968.

Too many organizations struggle today with the issue of constantly shifting priorities, causing many teams and individuals to work on several projects simultaneously. What was the number-one priority yesterday might not be the same today. So how can organizations maintain flexibility and effective responsiveness to changing business needs while providing their teams with the necessary focus to actually get something done?

As project manager, you have a great deal of say regarding decisions affecting your project, but everyone on the team -- including engineers, QA, sales, customer service, and other stakeholders -- knows that the project will only succeed if there is substantial consensus on what to do.

The title of a recent article in The Economist reads, "Companies Hope That "Chief Customer Officers" Will Provide Better Service.

Many people, when they think of Big Data development environments, tend to think of the main Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera, HortonWorks, or MapR. But other providers have innovative Hadoop offerings, too. One I've been examining recently is DataStax.

Machine learning (ML) techniques, often referred to as predictive analytics or marketing analytics, are becoming commonplace in business and research alike. Regardless of name, all refer to the process of collecting and processing data along with the subsequent application of mathematical analysis to gain valuable insights.

One of the most important disruptive technologies that businesses can employ today is video. Video can benefit several business activities, including training, corporate communications, collaboration and knowledge sharing, and CRM.

Big Data and analytics are of growing importance to the enterprise. These areas have developed so swiftly and contain such levels of potential complexity that they are creating a variety of staffing issues.